After finalising my project changes, little stood between research and application. Trying to navigate SERIES and my initial inspirations, key ideas and quotes soon became apparent in the direction and flow. With Wasson burning strongly, I decided to annotate phrases that particularly stood apart from the rest as a guiding point to further research.

 

Key quotes from Wasson on the Networked Screen:

• ‘Collectively such work has necessarily shifted our understanding of cinema away from a sacred and finite text towards an expanded system of overlapping relations…’ (pp. 72)

• ‘Moving images also touch down at identifiable moments and in particular places.’ (pp. 72)

• ‘Screens are nodes in complex networks.’ (pp. 72)

• ‘Movies—as moving images and as objects—have long been implicated in temporally and spatially specific material networks.’ (pp. 74)

• ‘Not only does the networked screen help us to understand changes germane to the history of film; the concept also helps us to understand the rapid diversification of moving image cultures and practices in the present.’ (pp. 79)

• ‘Streamed Web films relay an identifiable emergent aesthetic, dependent on a system of overlapping and constantly interacting systems of motion and variability.’ (pp. 81)

• ‘Web movies do not require that they be understood as a good, bad, failed, long-gone, or a substandard form of conventional realist cinema.’ (pp. 82)

• ‘…They also invite a particular way of looking, one that has a complex and reciprocal relationship with ways of engaging with images not generally associated with cinema.’ (pp. 86)

• ‘Rather than a cinema of attractions, little Web films suggest what I would like to call a notably fragmented cinema—a cinema of suggestion—that calls attention to its materiality and its status as bound to a tightly integrated network.’ (pp. 95)

• ‘The miniature images push our understanding of cinematic convention and our habits of watching.’ (pp. 96)

• ‘As screens become bigger and smaller, and images become more fluid, it is crucial not to lose sight of the persistent forms of materiality that undergird the meaning and experience of these moving images.’ (pp. 98)

• ‘The concept of the networked screen helps us to better acknowledge the interconnected relations among specific institutions, images, and screens.’ (pp. 98)

• ‘The networked screen is one such concept, linking screens to the larger and frequently amorphous ideas and practices that constitute them, and to the material contexts in which such screens link viewer to image, user to screen, and spectator to spectacle.’ (pp. 99)

 

By setting aside ‘questions of medium specificity’ in these key quotes, my research will take a formative role in reflecting on celluloid, electronic and digital images, their differentiated social and material sites of cultural engagement through the network of the screen. Focusing on the flow of frames, the concept of a screen as a surface really appeals to me. Currently working on the skeleton for SERIES, the blog will acknowlege the interconnected nature of frames, especially as images on screens. I don’t want to remove narrative from the frames, but I want to create fluidity and percieved depth, even though on the screen, it’s completely two dimensional.